Victor Reyes

Victor Reyes, 55, of Grant, died Tuesday, February 17, 2026, in the orchard where he had worked for thirty years, felled by a heart attack in the middle of the pruning, among the trees and the crews he had given his working life to. He was the foreman at Wilcox Ridge Orchards, and there was not a tree on the place he could not have found in the dark.

He was born August 10, 1970, in Weslaco, Texas, the oldest of Refugio and Estela Reyes's six children, into a family that followed the harvest north each summer — asparagus and cherries and apples — until the year they stopped following and stayed in Grant for good. Victor was twelve that year. He picked his first paid bushel before he was ten and never really did anything else, though he learned everything else around it: engines, irrigation, grafting, the weather, and enough of the orchard's mingled Spanish and Michigan English to make any crew laugh on a cold morning.

He became foreman at Wilcox Ridge in 1996 and ran its crews for thirty years. He knew the rootstock of every block and the temperament of every picker, and he had a gift — universally attested — for getting a hard, cold day's work out of people who would have run through a wall for him, because they knew he had already done every job he was asking of them and would do it again beside them if the count ran short. He pruned in February, thinned in June, ran the harvest through October, and worried about a late frost the way other men worry about their souls.

He kept an emergency fund in the glovebox of his truck — cash, quietly given, rarely repaid, and never once mentioned — for workers with a sick child, a broken-down car, a rent they could not make. He coached youth soccer in Grant for twenty years, read the Word as a lector at Saint Isidore, and cooked, on the good Sundays, for anyone who wandered into his yard, which was most of the neighborhood. He died as he might have chosen had anyone thought to ask him — on his feet, in the rows, in the middle of the work, on a bright cold pruning morning in February.

He is remembered for his hands and his humor, for the crews he turned into a family, and for a life spent proving, quietly and daily, that a man is measured by how he treats the people working beside him.

He is survived by his wife of thirty-one years, Alma; his children, Daniela (Marcos) Fuentes of Grand Rapids, Victor Reyes Jr. of Grant, and Sofía Reyes of Grant; three grandchildren; his parents, Refugio and Estela Reyes of Grant; his brothers, Ernesto, Ramiro, and Joel; and his sisters, Rosa Guerra and Yolanda Reyes.

He was preceded in death by an infant son, Ángel, in 1997.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial contributions be made to the workers' emergency fund Victor ran from his truck for thirty years, now continued in his name through Saint Isidore Catholic Church, so the glovebox is never empty.